


Singing To The Death Rattle

by Whispering_Sumire



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Alternate Universe - Human, Canonical Character Death, Death, Derek Hale Has Scars, Existentialism, F/F, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Friendship/Love, Genderswap, Ghosts, Grief/Mourning, Halloween, Handwavy Magic, Happy Ending, Light Angst, Magical Stiles Stilinski, POV Second Person, Rule 63, The Hale Fire (Teen Wolf), and lots of trauma, she needs all the therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-01
Updated: 2019-11-01
Packaged: 2021-01-16 03:49:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21264584
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Whispering_Sumire/pseuds/Whispering_Sumire
Summary: Her whole family died in that fire, excepting her mostly catatonic Aunt and her absentee older brother.She's awkward and emotionally clumsy and most people take one look at her and assume that she's three breaths away from slaughtering them and their families and probably their neighbours, too, for good measure. She's just got one of those faces. Which isn't to say that she doesn't have her moments of explosive violence born from ill-conceived panic and/or ferociously protective instincts, just that it's highly unlikely anormalperson would trigger them.Oh, Deryka.She's an absolute disaster.So of course you're hideously in love with her.





	Singing To The Death Rattle

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Halloween! I haven't written in awhile because I have been dealing with a lot of mental health and real-life stuff, but somehow I wanted to do something for the day, even if it wasn't that substantial. So, here you go! I played around a bit, I hope you like it!! ❀❀❀
> 
> Caution: No(r)ah's a little OOC in this one and I don't even know how it happened.
> 
> Trigger Warning: Fatal illness and alcoholism vaguely portrayed, and a lot of content surrounding death. The general tone is pretty light, but keep yourselves safe my darlings.

You have known people a hair's-breadth away from dying your entire life. It's not your fault, you didn't go looking for the elderly and the sickened and the sunken-eyed, they found you. Through fate or some other haphazard treaty between time and Gods that you were never privy to.

You were still-born. For two minutes your lungs were flightless birds and your heart was absent-minded and being stubborn about it. The Doctors who helped your mother birth you are still flabbergasted by your existence, by the sheer audacity of you to come into the world like that and not leave it when they expected you to, even as they take credit for your living at all.

One of them wrote a book about the whole affair. You have no idea how much he profited off of it, you have yet to see a dime.

Your mother remembers it differently. She tells everyone as you grow from cradle to training-bra that you're a goddamn miracle and all it took was a fucking blink. She says, "And I was staring at her really hard. I couldn't stop, because I thought if I just stared hard enough she'd be alive instead of dead, and for some reason - heaven knows why, it seems so stupid now - I was _ sure. _ I was sure down to my marrow that if I kept my eyes on her, she'd wake up."

She says this every year on your birthday. Never to you, and always with the thin neck of a wine glass glittering between her dainty fingers. Her teeth a stark flash of something dangerous when she grins, gleaming ivory against rich crimson.

"Then she does," your mother declaims. It's the best joke in her repertoire, she's told it a million times. "The second my eyes close, she just starts wailing like a goddamn banshee. You'd never have known if you hadn't been there a second earlier that she was anything other than a healthy little baby girl."

Her friends laugh with her, but you're bored and the starchy gossamer dress she made you wear for the party is scratchy and constricting. You think, maybe moving will help.

Maybe better company will help.

And so you find yourself amidst the fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers of all the elite strangers your mother has invited over. Mostly because their conversations catch your ear and send ripples of imperious intrigue splashing across your mind, partly because a third of them are keen enough to hear the pitter-pat of little feet for the imminent mischief it is.

Mrs. Knockman stops you from putting toads in her purse the first time you meet her, then helps you sneak them into the punch bowl thirty minutes later.

The party ends early, with a great deal of fanfare and dismay for everyone involved except you and Mrs. Knockman, who both laugh until you're sick with it.

Mrs. Knockman is your very best friend until she dies. She is only your very best friend for eight months, one week, and six and a half days.

It is the tragedy of old people to be at the end of their long lives, your mother tells you, her breath putrid with tonics as red as her pretty lips, condescension dripping from every saccharine word.

When you are older you will realize she's wrong. It is the tragedy of everything with a beginning that it must, eventually, have an end. It is the tragedy of life that your ending means your death.

And so there's a drop of tragedy in all of it, isn't there?

Of course, your mother thinks this is a very melodramatic view on the world and that you ought to find friends your own age, get these silly ideas out of your head, they'll take you nowhere nice. When she says this, you laugh. You laugh because it's _ your mother, _ the drunkard with friends in high places who will only last her as long as she doesn't age out of their standard of the word beautiful. You laugh until tears are tumbling down your cheeks and you're heaving, until the bilious sound bubbling up your throat and hiccuping off your tongue loses all meaning and you've forgotten why you were laughing in the first place.

Your mother looks at you like she's never seen you before in her life.

To be fair, she hasn't.

* * *

Fire tasted her skin long before you ever did.

For some reason, that's strangely seductive to you.

She is all muscle and sinew where you are sharp, protruding angles and spindly limbs. You're taller, but in every way that matters she's_ bigger, _ looms like some churlish sky, prowls like beasts made a den of her soul and frightened all her gentle away. Her body is a tapestry of scars, languid and mottled and shiny, splashing across her shoulder blades and dripping down her ribs, crawling up her calves and slithering around her neck.

Her whole family died in that fire, excepting her mostly catatonic Aunt and her absentee older brother. 

She's awkward and emotionally clumsy and most people take one look at her and assume that she's three breaths away from slaughtering them and their families and probably their neighbours, too, for good measure. She's just got one of those faces. Which isn't to say that she doesn't have her moments of explosive violence born from ill-conceived panic and/or ferociously protective instincts, just that it's highly unlikely a _ normal _ person would trigger them.

Oh, Deryka.

She's an absolute disaster.

So of course you're hideously in love with her.

* * *

Everyone you knew when you were twelve years old is dead now.

You have been to many, many funerals.

You've been staring mortality down your whole life, you danced with it just to get here. It is fair to say that you will die one day, that _ everything _ will be dead and gone and as lost to time as ancient civilizations or black holes that were once stars. You've learned to accept this, though it took you years.

When you were much younger you'd weep and throw tantrums and be furious that yet another precious thing was taken from you. Some nights, when it was very quiet and your mother was out - _ somewhere, somewhere, she never told you where or why or for how long _ \- you'd shiver and sob and question. Some nights, fear crept down your spine and tickled your toes with the icy chill of slow dawning.

The inevitable conclusion, that you would die too.

That the world would.

But you got to spend time and have conversations with these _ sickeningly brilliant _people, these people in their sixties and eighties who'd lived good lives and who had given authentic offerings of creativity and wisdom with their work. You watched, you learned, you lost.

Frothing over with thoughtless affection, you were, with fragile lilies spilling from your hands onto the soil that caged their coffins. You could never regret any of it.

They were good examples, that it was possible to get to that point and be fulfilled, happy. They were also good examples that there are _ no _ guarantees about what the rest of this is going to be, if anything at all, and you've got to move forward with that in mind.

There is an hourglass haunting your every thought, grains of sand counting down whatever time you may have left. You won't waste it, you swear, you _ won't waste it. _

* * *

Scottlyn was a sweet girl with a steep, bottomless sort of empathy that sometimes clashed with her convictions and the fact that her body was trying to kill her.

She's one of the only friends you ever had who was actually your age. She was also being hospitalized most of the time. You don't think your mother quite approved.

Scottlyn's father is the one who introduced you to the occult. He was a nurse and a witch—the _ old _ kind of witch, the kind of witch who's memorized his runes as well as his Gods, who sacrifices doves and deer and, once, very memorably, a bear, to keep his child alive for just that little bit longer. You were _ fascinated. _

But magic, as with everything, has its limits, and so too did Scottie.

She didn't get a funeral, she hadn't wanted one. She got an urn and the passenger's seat of her father's truck on the way to some undisclosed location. You got a veritable library, a cell-phone number, a hug goodbye, and taillights disappearing down a winding road soaked in twilight.

"I'm really glad I met you," Scottie'd said once, petrichor eyes sparkling, dimples kissing her cheeks. "I've always wanted a sister."

Her proclamation had derailed a long and rather detailed ramble about the history of scantily clad women jumping out of cakes, or, rather, pies. "What?" You'd begun, bemused. "Scottlyn. We've only known each other for a week."

She'd shrugged flippantly, tugging on a lock of your hair. "And?"

A sister.

A sister to carve out a piece of the lonely that dug its claws into you so young you can't remember it ever not being there. A sister to grow in the yawning cavern she'd made like wild ivy, all twisting tangle labyrinth of inescapable vines. A sister for years and years and miraculous years.

_ And nothing. _

"I'm really glad I met you," you whisper to the stardusted dark with salted tongue. "You were the best sister anyone could've asked for."

* * *

You were with him, when he killed that bear.

Scottie'd had a string of bad days. She was stuck under a too-neat starchy blanket suffused with artificial-clean chemical perfume, fighting a wheezing, bloody battle for every breath she took six miles away while you and her father hiked through the Preserve.

Melisseus was a kind, fierce man who had left his wife when she deemed her career, her faith, and her vices more important than their sick daughter. He knew that Scottlyn was going to die before death ever even glanced his way. He knew that taking Scottie to a little town where the air was cleaner would not save her, becoming a nurse would not save her, bending the very laws of nature with all the magic he had at his disposal _ would not save her. _ He told you once that it was the line of every possible future, that there was no potential fork in the road that could prevent it, he'd _ checked. _

That wasn't the point. That was never the point.

"I'm going to show you how to do this," he'd said, knife firmly in hand. "So that one of us can always stay with her, okay?"

"Okay," you'd said, and wondered if this was one of the lines his wife had drawn. Sacrificing animals to the Old Gods to buy their daughter time. You wondered if it was possible to resent someone you'd never even met. You wondered if it was fair to feel anything at all when you weren't there, you didn't know the circumstances, the intricate weave of needs and wants and selfishness that might pattern her humanity.

It was all guesswork. Guesswork that made you hateful.

You adored Scottlyn, after all, and you could never do anything without being completely consumed by it. Could never love anyone in degrees. If it ever happened it was always pure, untempered devotion.

Scottlyn's mother's decision to leave them, to become an unmendable tear in the fabric of their lives, hurt Scottlyn very deeply. You will never forgive her for that, for hurting someone you love, even if it happened somewhere you couldn't see and evolved from something you can't know.

You'll never forgive her.

Melisseus had taken you to a clearing, the sky invisible behind a canopy of leaves. It'd felt deceptively contained, like you were being cradled close by the forest, like the creep-chitter bugs and the chatter-chirp birds were its lullaby, like the shadows were liquid velvet invitation instead of pools of disquieting void.

He'd slicked a knife across the knit of his palm and drawn sigils on craggy rocks and sap-sticky bark, cutting two circles around the clearing. A spell of compulsion, to draw an animal in, and a spell of binding, to secure their soul and their essence when they died.

Before leaving Scottlyn you'd watched him draw two intersecting runes over the pulse in both of her wrists with a sterile needle. Shallow and meticulous, a ritual perfected with practice and accepted with an easy, if tremulous, smile.

"Doves are best for this type of ritual," he'd begun, talking as he worked.

"Why?" you'd interrupted, curiosity a voracious thing in your belly, always starving, always gnawing. He shot you a flicker of a smile.

"Because of what they represent. The end of a long and arduous journey, a return to purity after strife, that sort of thing."

"So we're cashing in on the metaphor?"

He'd snorted, "Something like that. But it's rare to get a dove in a place like this, it's much more likely we'll end up with a deer—"

At which point they'd heard the grumbling roar of a very irate and disturbingly close _ bear. _

"—or not," he'd finished, voice going high and reedy.

See, the thing is, Melisseus would tell you later, drenched in silt-matted blood and sweat and grime, magic calls the animal that is needed to complete the ritual. Sometimes that animal isn't always what the caster expects. Occasionally, this can mean that the spell was done incorrectly; more often than not, however, it's just the Gods playing their games.

Gods have a very fucked up sense of humour, you'd bitten back, clutching the bandage he'd pressed to your ravaged side - horrendously painful, but not life-threatening - and he'd laughed, petrichor eyes sparkling, dimples kissed on his cheeks, just like his daughter.

The magic calls the animal, the magic steals its left-over spirit, but _ you _ are the one who must take its life. That is the exchange, the sacrifice, the respect rituals like these demand.

Some lessons are better learnt through experience and humility. You had understood that, you might've even recognized the gift that had been inadvertently given to you. Tomorrow, you'd decided, you'd feel grateful.

But in that moment, you and Melisseus both dirty and wounded with that goddamned bear's carcass at your feet, you let yourself feel a little bitter.

Your gratitude, you'd discover, would be unwilling to wait for tomorrow. It would bloom feverish and dizzyingly bright the second you saw Scottlyn again, stronger, sweeter, more alive.

No. The point was never to save her.

The point was to help her survive, to help her live as painlessly as possible for as long as the universe would let you have her.

* * *

You and Deryka are a strange case of overlapping coincidences entrenched in macabre circumstance.

The first time you relate to her in any form, you are nine. Your mother is sweet-talking a deputy who's trying to arrest her for public intoxication. She gets let off the hook when a call, frantic and urgent, comes over the radio. The next day, word of the fire has spread, wild and rumour-laden and underscored with gossip like it's not something that killed eleven people, like it's not grotesque and overwhelmingly sad. To the bored denizens of this mundane little town, the fire is thrilling.

The glut of excitement.

They feed off the travesty like vultures and regurgitate it to their spouses and their family and their friends and the goddamn media. Thoughtlessly.

At the time, you are not offended by this. You are a child, far more interested in... Well, you can't precisely say _ childish _ things. But the fire doesn't affect you, so you don't pay attention to it.

When you actually meet her, you're visiting someone in the hospital (this is also how you will meet Scottlyn).

She is in the bed beside Old Man Joseph, bandages strangling her neck, suffocating her limbs, sunken eyes pits of shadowed misery in the jaundiced lighting. You and Old Man Joseph do your homework together, complaining and commiserating about the dreadful teachers you're stuck with and the horrendous doctors he's sure are trying to kill him.

Deryka starts to cry somewhere between Ms. Harris, the chemistry teacher with a grudge who demands her students partner up for every little thing, and Porcupine, that one nurse with ice-box hands who takes thirty tries to find the damn vein. You buy her a Reese's Cup from the vending machine before you leave, because even if it doesn't cheer her up it's generally nice to have chocolate.

Unless you're allergic, you realize, three blocks departed, and run all the way back to ask her if she is.

Her mouth is already full, there's chocolate smeared on her cheek, and her red-rimmed rain forest eyes look vaguely homicidal (you will learn later that this expression translates to extreme discomfort and uncertainty for how to respond).

"Oh," you say, panting, hands braced on your knees. "Cool. You're already—so you obviously aren't allergic, and—. Nevermind!"

Old Man Joseph laughs at you. Howls and guffaws and you stick your tongue out at him, embarrassed but defiant.

Her expression smooths somewhat, but she still looks haunted and heartbroken and awful under the general aura of _ intimidating. _ You don't know what's happened to her (you won't connect the dots for three whole weeks. You're appalled at yourself), but you figure she's probably got every right.

You get her another Reese's Cup. It seems like the right thing to do.

"I'm Mieczysława."

She takes this gift even more warily than she took the first one. Granted, you kind of shoved the first one at her and gallivanted off before she could protest, let alone respond.

"Deryka," comes the reply, a low rasp, autumn leaves crunching underfoot.

You don't see her again for six years.

* * *

You are familiar with isolation, with its' thick, static sludge scraping at your bones, chewing your soul down to that raw empty-ache.

Isolation is not the same as lonely.

Lonely is a scab you pick at compulsively, lonely is an infection that hasn't gotten bad enough to kill you yet. Isolation is deeper. Isolation has already gouged its' teeth into the soft, fragile organ that is your heart. Isolation is a child with a new toy who will throw a tantrum if anyone tries to take it away.

And the funny thing is that humans aren't _ built _ for isolation, but we build ourselves _ into _ it like idiots. These sturdy boxes we live in, keeping out the elements. Keeping out the people. We watch others writhe in their helpless and do nothing. Walk away. Close our doors and lock them.

Your mother is like that with you. To her, you're just too much. Too much need, too much frenetic wild, too much like her dead husband who she never quite stopped mourning. She can't handle it, so she runs away.

Most people your age think you're weird. Some freak of nature abnormality, and, to be honest, it used to bother you.

You used to try and cramp yourself down into the tiny little acceptable puzzle-piece they wanted you to be, in order to be accepted, in order to be liked, in order to have contact. Then you gave up.

You were devoting yourself, your time and your effort, to these alien creatures you couldn't understand at all. Children untouched by mortality, privileged with loving family or quieter minds or easier dispositions, perhaps blessed with something invisible to you that you would never be able to grasp. You wanted so badly to fit in and it just wasn't working.

It was gruelling and exhausting and debilitating, but it wasn't fucking working.

So you gave up. You accepted the fact that most of the people you enjoyed were six feet under, accepted the fact that there wasn't anyone here you even liked_ yourself, _ and decided to forego shallowly vying for their attention and acceptance. Begging for scraps as you had been just wasn't worth it.

So, with a general air of _ fuck them, _ you moved on.

It was a good decision, it vastly improved your quality of life, even if there's a slight possibility it utterly destroyed whatever filters you may've had left.

But the isolation is still there. Stays with you.

Sometimes you wonder if you learned it or if it was something you were born with. A miasmic ink-stain on your soul you'll never be rid of.

* * *

Deryka likes to be pinned under you, full-body. Contained. Surrounded.

She never tells you why she left her brother to come back to Beacon Hills, but you can guess. You can guess by the way she cares for her Aunt dutifully and delicately, you can guess by the way she and her brother have foundation jarring arguments about leaving the woman behind. _ She's basically dead, _ Deryka's brother once screamed during one of his very rare visits, _ get over it already. _

Deryka had looked stoic and furious, had shaken her head mutely, solemn, and pointed her brother to the door.

An hour or so after he'd gone, she fell into you. You're still not entirely sure how it happened, there were a lot of tears involved, a lot of cuddling, and a surprising amount of intimacy.

You don't think she loves you. Maybe she never will, or maybe now's just not the right time. It's certainly not the right time to ask it of her, nor would it be fair to expect it from her.

You entertain daydream hopes, sometimes, but your strongest wish is that you two could remain friends, no matter how things turn out.

* * *

You tell her you can perform a séance for Samhain. You tell her it might not work but you still want to try.

Deryka's drowning. She's been drowning for as long as you've known her, in guilt, in grief, in her own inability to communicate. Her seams all frayed, sewn with a rusted gallows needle, leaving bits of her spilling out until she's nothing but hollow. Nothing but her own assumption of irreparably broken. Nothing but isolation just as toxic and overwhelming as your own even if the flavour's different.

You don't know if seeing the ghosts of her dead family will help or just make things worse, but you've never been able to leave well enough alone. And it kills you, it _ kills _ you to see her in so much pain.

She needs therapy.

You know this. She knows this. Hell, the whole town probably knows this.

But she keeps procrastinating and vacillating on whether or not she's ready, whether or not she has enough time in the day, insecure about whoever she sees trying to toss medicine at her for a quick paycheck. You remind her that she can change therapists until she finds a good fit, you barrel through the _ but my Aunt _ run-around with _ how can you keep your Aunt healthy if _ ** _you're_ ** _ not healthy _. Every conversation leaves her more convinced and a little less grumpy about it.

Next week isn't about that.

Next week is the first Samhain you're spending with the girl you love and that's _ important. _You want to do something special with her.

So you tell her while you're painting spiders on her Aunt's fingernails like it's no big deal, and you ask her to think about it.

* * *

"No," had been Scottlyn's response when you'd asked her, told her you could summon her ghost to visit every Samhain. "No," she'd said. "I want to travel the world."

You'd given her a sardonic look. "As a corpse? Wouldn't that take all the fun out of it?"

"How would you know?" She'd wondered, eyebrows raised, "Have _ you _ ever been dead?"

"No. But I will be someday. I mean, unless I find the ticket to immortality in one of your dad's books somewhere." (Spoiler: you never did.)

She'd laughed at you, swinging her legs at the end of the hospital bed. You were waiting for her doctor to come back with yet more results from yet more tests. She'd been worsening for weeks, but that day had been a good one; the sun caressing her dark skin, softening the rivulets of her mahogany hair in seas of liquid gold, her lungs soaking in the warm, clear air instead of rejecting it. Her breath had still rasped slightly, as it always did, had come and gone in shallow gusts, as it always would, but it was uninterrupted by mire or strife.

She'd tilted her head up slightly, bearing her throat to the world, eyes fluttering shut. 

Inhale, exhale. A struggle with something you've always taken for granted. Inhale, exhale. Her lungs to her ribs like a baby's rattle to the bars of a crib, all fragile animal knock-clattering against its' cage, rebellious or wanting or simply deeming the silence an intolerable vulgarity. Inhale, exhale.

"The only road trip I've ever been on," she'd said to the ceiling, "was the one it took to get here from New York. I _ loved _ it, Mischief. I loved seeing everything shift and change, seeing how different people can be. Language, culture, the freaking sky. There's a different kind of sky for every place, I swear." She'd rolled her head on her shoulders, looked at you with the sun blazing through her eyes. 

"I can't stay here," she'd said. "I love you, but I can't stay."

* * *

You've only summoned a ghost for yourself once.

Perhaps that's strange, considering your friend-group mostly landed in the _ long-dead _ column. To be honest, you didn't want to be obtrusive to their rest, especially when you didn't actively _ need _ them. Perhaps you _ wanted _ them, but that's another matter entirely, isn't it?

You did not call upon your father, who had died a slow, agonizing death when you were very young. Somehow that felt both selfish and awkward—perhaps you would've garnered something from it, perhaps it would've helped you in some way, but... His passing had been a long time ago, and while there was an ache in your heart whenever you thought of him, it just didn't seem right.

The first time you performed a séance it was largely to see if you _ could _ and partly because it was Samhain and you had nothing better to do.

The ghost you convened with was a boy who'd died in a car crash earlier that year, Malachi Tate. A stranger to you.

His family had been in the car, but he'd been the only fatality. He'd been pretty cool about the whole thing, after the initial _ what the fuck _ of it all. Apparently being woken from rest or transported from one's haunt was a particularly shocking and exceedingly rare ordeal.

He'd laughed in your face when you asked about the afterlife, said, "Couldn't tell you," and laughed harder when you glared at him because that explained exactly less than nothing.

He looked as he had before the crash, no gore or lethal injury of any kind to be seen, but his colour was all bleached with mist, fog lapping at his half-transparent form, billowing around his feet. His irises were like fireflies, all honeyed luminescent flicker.

He was a funny guy, off-handedly blasé, candid, a little too sharp to be outright sweet. Worried about his family, his parents, his little brother.

You offered to help him write a letter.

It had been a long, emotionally wrought night, but worth it in the end. Satisfying.

And you got the confirmation you'd been seeking.

It was a ritual that could only be done one night of the year, but, hey, you could _ do it. _ And wasn't that something?

* * *

"I want to see them again," Deryka tells you, and she tries to keep her face blank, impassive. But her words twist her lips to trembling, her voice stained with childish, frightened yearning.

You wonder if she suspects you'd rip the offer out from under her so suddenly after she's accepted it, you wonder if she thinks that little of you. Probably.

She thinks that little of the world at large, her jaded coiled around her, hissing at everything in sight. _ Threat _ _,_ it whispers in her ear sibilantly, of all of it.

"Okay," you say.

Deryka's rain-swept meadow eyes soften with badly hidden relief. Silly girl. Sweet, silly girl.

* * *

Samhain, All Hallows' Eve, _ Halloween. _

The day is special to you for far more than its festivities, although you have to admit that seeing people of all shapes and sizes and chronological order dress up and get sugar-high is awesome. Magic is stronger this day, light wanes faster, the veil is thinner. Electricity delights at the air, currents of it rushing through you on every breath.

Deryka seems wary. She doesn't like the crowds. More than that, she can't seem to understand why you're doing this, why you're going through with it, why the other shoe hasn't dropped yet.

"Come on," you say, imperiously, your fingers threaded through hers. You don't let go until you get there.

Deryka squeezes your hand. She breathes. She lets you shield her from the people and the fanfare. You don't think you could stop smiling if you tried.

The Cemetery in which Deryka's family resides is one of the only two cemeteries in Beacon Hills, and it's the one that requires hiking up a steep, forested trail, where the other is parked innocuously by the roadside. You don't mind the trek - fresh air, getting in tune with nature, all that - and Deryka relaxes minutely the second the hordes and their enthusiastic atmosphere abate.

"Do you have any idea what you're going to say to them?" You ask, curious, as you both climb over a tree that's fallen on the path. You're careful not to crush the flowers rooted in knots of decaying bark, their milky petals soft and tenuous, all fey and wan against the tree they've overtaken. Deryka follows your lead but plucks a few of them from their homes, holding them in an awkward bundle in her fist, an offering.

She doesn't answer, but you weren't really expecting her to.

You fill up the silence with inane musings and suggestions and enactments for how the big reunion conversation could go; you keep it light and as undaunting as you possibly can, trying to ease the last of the tension plaguing Deryka's shoulders. Quiet doesn't blanket either of you until you're standing in front of the large, steel, gothic gates. And even then, you can't bear it for very long.

"It's like they're _ begging _ to be haunted," you say, giving the victorian fencing a sardonically doubtful look.

"Shut up," Deryka bites, but her eyes are the closest to soft they've been all day, so you feel satisfied. And a little smug.

"Who ya' gonna call," you sing-song as you stride through, Deryka slogging behind you.

"Please, no."

"Ghostbusters!" You shout, out-of-tune, laughingly. She tugs her hand out of yours, rolling her eyes.

"You're awful."

"I'm delightful," you correct her, "and you love me."

She hums noncommittally, leading you past aisles of headstones and statues that vary between angelic and grim-reaper-chic. Her family's mausoleum is all robin's egg and ivory marble, pillars and domes and glass, stained with time. It's grievously beautiful, a little breathtaking, a little nauseating. Deryka gives you a careful look before venturing inside to wait by their graves as you begin the ritual that will virtually, and only for a limited time, raise them from the dead.

The work distracts you from the comfortable silence that descends. It's rare for you to accept anything calm or hushed, you've always been this too-loud, too-fast, abrasively frenzied thing, but Deryka cloaks herself in it. She's never done well with talking, with company, with any pace faster than sedate. Still, you catch her side-eying you through the elegantly mournful archway a few times with puckered brows and thinned lips, until finally:

"Talk." Clipped. Flat.

"About what?" You ask, sugar-water light. She glares. You smile and bat your lashes.

"Stiles," she says.

You wonder if she's just gotten used to the way your lungs are so full of words you can hardly expel air without rambling about _ something _ or if the quiet that she usually clings to just isn't as comforting when she's about to see her dead family again for the first time in a decade.

"No matter what anyone tells you," you say decisively, grunting as you shove a large stone from its previous home to where you need it, "there's no science to grief. Grief is just... grief. That's all."

"Oh, _ that's all?" _ Deryka wonders waspishly, her words awash with sarcasm.

"That's all," you repeat. "But some people really suck at dealing with it. My mom, for instance. Drinking doesn't help her, doesn't help _ anything, _ and I highly doubt my dad would like the woman she's become now that her head's shoved so far down the bottle she can't even see daylight. And yet..."

"Stiles," she says, with an expression that tells you to _ get to the goddamned point. _

"You have no sense of theatre," you inform her, placing the skull of a vulture in a nest of dried herbs and flowers atop the stone and surrounding it with homemade candles.

"Fuck your theatre."

"It's going to be hard," you continue, ignoring her. "Even if I do this every Samhain, it's going to be hard Deryka, because they're still dead. For all that I _ can _ do, I can't actually permanently bring them back. You get that, right?"

Her shoulders slump and her eyes drift down, but she says nothing.

"Are you still sure you want to do this?" You ask, because you have to.

"Yes," she answers, barely audible, softer than the brisk wind that whisks it away. Fallen leaves rustle across the brick trails that serpentine throughout this place, tinkling and singing like silvery rain even though there's hardly a cloud in the dusky sky.

"Okay. Cool. So..." you smirk, "what _ are _ you going to talk to them about?" Deryka makes a very annoyed noise. "I'm serious!" You laugh, "Come on, we're dragging them here all the way from the astral plane, we should at least have an ice-breaker prepared. Like, um, how's college going? Or-or—"

"I'm going to kill you."

"I'd haunt you. And I'd be ten thousand times more annoying as a ghost, bet you twenty dollars and a doughnut."

Her eye twitches. "You don't even _ like _ doughnuts."

"So?"

"So,_ fuck you." _

"In front of your family?" you wonder dubiously. "I mean, not to kink-shame or anything, but I don't know if I'm down for that. It would be _ extremely _ awkward. Although, hey, at least then we'd have a conversation piece, right?"

Deryka gives you a very dramatic expression that could likely be roughly translated to mean, _ why the fuck am I friends with this bitch, _ or _ the second she's done with this ritual I'm going to murder her. Slowly _.

You cackle.

"Witch," she says, flat.

"All I need now is green skin, warts, a flying broom, and a pointy hat," you agree breathlessly.

She clicks her teeth at you.

It probably says something about your life that this is the most fun you've had in a _ while. _

* * *

"Aaaannnd, done," you say, flapping your match in the air until its flame goes out. The atmosphere settles, coagulates, seems to thicken until it's about the consistency of maple syrup before a gaggle of disembodied voices break the tension.

Deryka's eyes tighten, spine straightens, fists clench. She looks like she's three seconds away from spontaneously combusting so you walk over to her and place your hands on her shoulders like you're her boxing coach about to usher her into the ring.

"Calm down," you tell her.

She grimaces and squirms on the marble bench that sprouts up from the middle of the floor of the mausoleum, ivy and lily-bulbs and blue jays all sculpted pretty around its legs. As soon as the abrupt and abnormal fog dissipates enough for you to see the solid silhouette of one of Deryka's family members, you ask, "What's with the fairy-tale greenhouse theme?"

Both because you can't help yourself and because Deryka's grinding her teeth so hard you're surprised her pearly whites haven't disintegrated to dust.

"Great Grandmama Rosie," a ghost answers, voice echoey and bemused.

Deryka sucks in a very sharp breath and goes almost comically still. You dig your thumbs into her muscles and start kneading in a silent appeal for her to _ relax. _

"That explains absolutely nothing," you inform Casper.

"For what purpose were we summoned?" challenges another Casper, with a deeper, more mountain avalanche rumble sort of voice.

"I asked her to," Deryka says, very wetly, as she begins to tremble. At which point her vaguely translucent, horror movie cliche family descends into a pandemonium of coos and cheek-pinching and cuddles which you inevitably get swept up in because being the volunteer occultist/best friend with benefits apparently warrants that. From what you can gather in the ensuing chaos, Deryka's family is evidently of the belief that calling on their spirits from beyond the grave for a little spectral convention is _ adorable. _

This is the craziest thing you've ever been subjected to and you literally watched your father die right in front of you.

Also, you fought a bear once.

When the general excitement finally subsides, Deryka is practically hyperventilating, and then she's flat-out breaking down with blubbering apologies and going on about how the fire was all her fault and she should've died with them. Because survivor's guilt is a thing, and, as you may have mentioned, this girl needs _ therapy. _

Fortunately for everyone, a great deal of her family agrees with you and proceeds to argue that point for the next hour. Her father has a specific person in mind, her Great Aunt abhors this person and would highly recommend Deryka go to literally anyone else. They duke it out over Deryka's head like it's a foregone conclusion that she'll go, with Deryka acting as the rope caught betwixt their dogs in a spontaneous war of the tugging variety.

You struggle against feeling endeared by this. You largely fail.

When Deryka plaintively tries to confess her (literally non-existent) sins one more time for the people in the back, her mother slaps her upside the head and her little sister octopuses around her waist in order to give her a wet-willy. Considering their incorporeality the effect is mostly lost, but they get their point across.

Deryka, miracle of all miracles, grudgingly accepts and agrees that she maybe needs some help and that she'll be less _ digging her heels in _ about it from now on. 

Thank the Gods.

You immediately retract that gratitude when Deryka's family decides, now _ that _ matter's settled, to clue in on your existence again. Awesome.

An abundance of well-meaning familial ghosts is just. A little much. Cute, but a little much. Worse, when they realize that questioning your relationship with Deryka causes a great deal of sputtering and blushing and undignified behaviour from the both of you.

You've heard stories of larger families meddling in their children's love-lives. You never expected to experience it, let alone in this context.

By the time the sun begins ambling above the horizon and your spirit court has to adjourn, you and Deryka have both agreed to check out three different therapists, and go on a _ real _ date, just to see where it takes you. You feel like Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, swept up in a natural disaster and whisked away to an alternate fucking universe.

_ "Your family," _ you intone, bewildered and strangely exuberant in that manic-giggly punch-drunk kind of way.

"My family," Deryka agrees on a breath, before bursting into laughter that gallops past her tongue and teeth like a goddamn_ unicorn. _ It's the first time she's laughed in all the years that you've known her.

To say it's lovely would be an understatement.

To say it's infectious would just be redundant.

**Author's Note:**

> _And they lived happily ever after._
> 
> Every Halloween they are subjected to a bunch of ghosts asking for all the gossip and meddling in their love-life and eventually asking them to meddle in _other people's_ love-lives in their stead—which is how they will eventually meet and freak the hell out of Veronica Boyd and Eric Reyes, because our girls do subtlety about as well as a sledgehammer. (Just imagine Deryka in a sunhat with a dramatically wide brim and mind-boggling sunglasses glaring at them over a magazine on their first date, and Stiles somehow - probably through bribery and blackmail - ending up as their overly chipper waitress. Then imagine Boyd and Eric inevitably cornering them and asking why the strangers who played cupid for them for no apparent reason are stalking them and Stiles and Deryka confessing that it's because their ghost family wouldn't get off their backs about it. Stiles and Deryka sound completely insane until the next Halloween, wherein Boyd and Eric get dragged to the Hale Mausoleum and are promptly cooed at and fawned over by a slew of familial spectres with nothing better to do.)
> 
> Happy Halloween, lovelies!!


End file.
